fredag 29 januari 2016

After watching a Swedish Television documentary about the unsuccessful transplantations by Paolo Macchiarini on 3 patients at Karolinska and 3 patients in Russia, Rector Hamsten at Karolinska, the crown jewel of Swedish science, decided that if what happened to the patients in Russia according to the documentary was indeed true, then Karolinska would have to reconsider its long time support for Macchiarini reported as follows in Science Aug 28 2015:

Karolinska Institute clears trachea surgeon of misconduct charges.

The logic of Hamsten presented to Swedish Television as a reaction to the documentary, thus is that the unsuccessful transplantations in Russia, performed after those at Karolinska, were (possibly) disastrous, while the unsuccessful transplantations at Karolinska performed with even less experience, were if not successful in any case fully satisfactory taking everything into consideration, more precisely the circumstance that the untested transplantations were performed on patients who would (for sure) die anyway sooner or later.

onsdag 27 januari 2016

In a series of posts (listed under Newtonian mechanics) I have explored the idea of viewing the gravitational potential $\phi (x,t)$ as primordial physical entity, with $x$ a Euclidean space coordinate and $t$ a time coordinate $t$, from which the distribution of matter with density $\rho (x,t)$ is given by (with scaling to unity):

$\Delta\phi (x,t) =\rho (x,t)$ (1)

by the local operation of differentiation of the Laplacian in space $\Delta$. This view possibly opens to an understanding of the mystery of both dark energy, dark matter and cosmic inflation. Recall that (1) as the essence of Newton's theory of gravitation, also is Einstein's equation in flat Minkowski space-time.

To lift the curtain, imagine an initial state with $\phi =0$ and thus $\rho =0$ and suppose $\phi$ at time $t=0$ is subject to a local perturbation resulting in a corresponding fluctuating $\Delta\phi$ with as much positive matter where $\Delta\phi (x,t)$ is positive, as negative matter where $\Delta\phi (x,t)$ is negative. Suppose the initial configuration consists of negative matter surrounded by positive matter in spherical symmetry, thus a shell/ball of negative matter (red) surrounded by positive matter (blue), as in the above picture of a youtube-clip. Note that positive matter attracts positive matter, but repels negative matter, and vice versa.

Watching the clip you see starting from rest negative (red) matter contracting under attraction and positive matter (blue) expanding under repulsion from negative matter overpowering attraction from positive matter.

If we now think of our Universe as consisting of positive matter, we thus find an expanding Universe as if driven by a mysterious force named dark energy and we thus are led to connect the origin of dark energy to negative matter. Note that the core of negative matter oscillates between contraction and expansion, while the region of positive matter continues to expand on a much longer time scale.

We may further connect regions of positive matter where $\Delta\phi (x,t)$ is smooth as regions filled with dark matter, and then singular concentrations of $\Delta\phi (x,t)$ as visible matter.

In this model we start from zero, and Big Bang is represented by a small perturbation of the gravitational potential $\phi$ with large output $\Delta\phi$ as balancing positive and negative matter. It is then the nature of the Laplacian as local differentiation, as an illposed or unstable mathematical operation, which can turn a small perturbation into something big like a Universe. Big Bang thus does not come out as a big local explosion, for which a reason is lacking, but rather as the effect of a small perturbation of a zero-state which is inflated by the Laplacian.

In particular, the inflation of the Universe connects to the relation $\Delta\phi =\rho$ and not as in cosmic inflation theory to yet another mystery.

Finally, with matter derived from a gravitational potential by local differentiation, the unsolved problem of the nature of action at distance does show up at all: All action is local and there is no action at distance and nothing of that sort to explain.

Is then our expanding Universe of positive matter powered by an oscillating Universe of negative matter, with plus and minus adding to zero, resulting from an initial perturbation of a gravitational potential through the action of a Laplacian? Yes, why not? Compare with Genesis 1:1-4 with the initial perturbation just a little twist of God's finger:

The Sun’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is actually a triple-star system —three stars bound together by gravity.

Alpha Centauri A and B are two bright, closely orbiting stars with a distant, dim companion, Proxima Centauri.

The binary appears to the unaided eye as a single star, the third brightest in the night sky, but it lies 4.37 light years from the Sun — Proxima Centauri claims the honor of being our true nearest neighbor at only 4.24 light years away.

It’s difficult to conceptualize such vast distances, but a popular analogy sets the Sun at the size of a grapefruit. If you wanted to get from your grapefruit-sized Sun to a grapefruit-sized Alpha Centauri system, you would have to travel about 2,500 miles, which is about the distance from coast to coast on the continental United States. And that’s just to the Sun’s closest neighbor!

So to escape global warming our only chance is to reach Alpha Centauri or beyond, at least 4 light years away, with a lot of material, food and people to build a colony. Of course clever scientists can make this come true...

söndag 10 januari 2016

The Secret of the Piano exhibits a basic resonance phenomenon where the vibrations of a collection of strings are kept in phase by all having a phase shift of half a period vs a soundboard in a "breathing" interaction between strings and soundboard with the strings moving "in" when the soundboard goes "out" and vice versa. The collection of strings and the soundboard thus take "opposite positions".

This phenomenon may also be seen in the interaction between human beings in a society, where a collection of people "march in step" e.g by sharing certain political views, and one may ask how this coordination comes about:

Is it the idea of a leader that is adopted and followed?

Is it a common "enemy" as the opposite of a leader, which unites people?

The lesson from the piano suggests 2, the reason being that in this case there is massive energy exchange between strings and soundboard back-and-forth allowing coordination to occur. On the other hand, when strings and soundboard vibrate in phase and then without energy exchange, there is no correction mechanism and strings and soundboard will quickly go out-of-phase.

Similarly, one may expect that "negative leadership" may be more effective than "positive leadership", because taking opposite views involves massive exchange of energy thus allowing correction to occur, while agreeing can be effortless without corrective measure.

This observation may connect to my experience of many times ending up with the opposite view of a group of people all marching in step and with a lot of energy mobilized on both parts.

The World as Computation presents an approach to physics based on a concept of finite precision computation, which opens to digital simulation of physical processes viewed as analog computation, in general in the form of time-stepping relaxation towards satisfaction of certain equations expressing conservation of mass, momentum, energy et cet.

In this world of finite precision computation, turbulence as a main mystery of classical mechanics, can be understood as the result of a computational relaxation process aimed at producing an exact solution of Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics, which however misses this goal because every exact solution of Navier-Stokes with small viscosity is unstable and thus is not reachable by relaxation.

Turbulent flow as fluctuating, complex and locally unpredictable flow, or physical reality in all its complexity, thus can be seen as the result of repeated failure to compute an exact solution:

The ideal (exact solution) is unstable and thus cannot take real form.

What can take real form is an approximate solution resulting from a finite precision computational process aimed at producing the exact solution.

The fact that all snow flakes, leaves and human beings are different can thus be explained by the fact that there are so many ways to fail (more or less), while there is only one road to complete success, but a road that cannot be followed because it is too narrow.

The complexity of the world can thus can (maybe) be viewed as a result of massive repeated failure, rather than the creation of a creator of infinite fantasy.

It is maybe illuminating to realise that (according to Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants): The closer a face hews to an ideal average human face, the more attractive we find it.

It is natural to compare with machine made copies of a mechanical part of a car or a microprocessor, which are constructed with the explicit goal to make them all identical and interchangeable, a goal that is less obvious when nature is constructing (although ans to us seem pretty identical and interchangeable).